The Quantum Universe

Everything That Can Happen Does Happen

Beschreibung des Verlags

The Quantum Universe brings together two authors on a brilliantly ambitious mission to show that everyone can understand the deepest questions of science.

But just what is quantum physics? How does it help us understand the world? Where does it leave Newton and Einstein? And why, above all, can we be sure that the theory is good?

The bizarre behaviour of the atoms and energy that make up the universe has led to some very woolly pronouncements on the nature of all interconnectedness. Here, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw give us the real science, and reveal the profound theories that allow for concrete, yet astonishing, predictions about the world.

This is our most up-to-date picture of reality.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY05.03.2012

In their newest, the University of Manchester physics team that produced Why Does E=mc2? aims to make quantum theory "perhaps the prime example of the infinitely esoteric becoming the profoundly useful" understandable for a general audience, explaining not only what it is and how it works, but why it is important. Beginning with a brief scientific history that will be familiar to anyone who's completed college physics (but accessible to those who have not), Cox and Forshaw review Newton's laws and the discoveries of Becquerel, Rutherford, Bohr, and Heisenberg before turning to their explanation of particles and waves, as inspired by Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winner described by his friend Freeman Dyson as simultaneously "all genius, all buffoon." The authors also go on to explain the origin of the periodic table, strong and weak nuclear forces, "Why We Don't Fall Through the Floor," and myriad other interesting topics. Though Cox and Forshaw state that their goal is to "demystify quantum theory," readers will nevertheless be confronted with plenty of equations and graphs rather than anecdotes and photos. Illus.